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. 2014 Sep:98:435-41.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.04.080. Epub 2014 May 9.

Language-general and -specific white matter microstructural bases for reading

Mingxia Zhang  1 , Chuansheng Chen  2 , Gui Xue  1 , Zhong-Lin Lu  3 , Leilei Mei  4 , Hongli Xue  1 , Miao Wei  5 , Qinghua He  6 , Jin Li  7 , Qi Dong  8
Affiliations

Language-general and -specific white matter microstructural bases for reading

Mingxia Zhang et al. Neuroimage. 2014 Sep.

Abstract

In the past decade, several studies have investigated language-general and -specific brain regions for reading. However, very limited research has examined the white matter that connects these cortical regions. By using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), the current study investigated the common and divergent relationship between white matter integrity indexed by fractional anisotropy (FA) and native language reading abilities in 89 Chinese and 93 English speakers. Conjunction analysis revealed that for both groups, reading ability was associated with the FA of seven white matter fiber bundles in two main anatomical locations in the left hemisphere: the dorsal corona radiate/corpus callosum/superior longitudinal fasciculus which might be for phonological access, and the ventral uncinate fasciculus/external capsule/inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus which might be for semantic processing. Contrast analysis showed that the FA of the left temporal part of superior longitudinal fasciculus contributed more to reading in English than in Chinese, which is consistent with the notion that this tract is involved in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for alphabetic language reading. These results are the first evidence of language-general and -specific white matter microstructural bases for reading.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Tracts whose FA was related to reading abilities of Americans (blue) or Chinese (red) or both (green, emphasized via TBSS command tbss_fill) (corrected p<.05) and the scatter plot of associations between reading and FA of two main anatomical locations in left hemisphere (dorsal CR/CC/SLF and ventral UF/EC/IFO). L, left hemisphere; R, right hemisphere; CR, superior corona radiate; CC, body of corpus callosum; SLF, superior longitudinal fasciculus; UF, uncinate fasciculus; EC, external capsule; IFO, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Tract whose FA was specifically related to reading abilities of Americans (red, emphasized via TBSS command tbss_fill) (corrected p<.05) and the scatter plot of associations between reading and FA of this tract (the left temporal SLF). L, left hemisphere; R, right hemisphere; SLF, superior longitudinal fasciculus.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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